The Autobiography of Red Read Online Free PDF Page A

satisfied,
     
    said Herakles. Geryon felt all nerves in him move to the surface of his body.
     
    What do you mean
satisfied?
     
    Just—satisfied. I don’t know.
From far down the freeway came a sound
     
    of fishhooks scraping the bottom of the world.
     
    You know. Satisfied.
Geryon was thinking hard. Fires twisted through him.
     
    He picked his way carefully
     
    toward the sex question. Why is it a question? He understood
     
    that people need
     
    acts of attention from one another, does it really matter which acts?
     
    He was fourteen.
     
    Sex is a way of getting to know someone,
     
    Herakles had said. He was sixteen. Hot unsorted parts of the question
     
    were licking up from every crack in Geryon,
     
    he beat at them as a nervous laugh escaped him. Herakles looked.
     
    Suddenly quiet.
     
    It’s okay,
said Herakles. His voice washed
     
    Geryon open.
     
    Tell me,
said Geryon and he intended to ask him, Do people who like sex
     
    have a question about it too?
     
    but the words came out wrong—
Is it true you think about sex every day?
     
    Herakles’ body stiffened.
     
    That isn’t a question it’s an accusation.
Something black and heavy dropped
     
    between them like a smell of velvet.
     
    Herakles switched on the ignition and they jumped forward onto the back of the night.
     
    Not touching
     
    but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.
     
     

XI. HADES
     
    Click here for original version
     
    Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
     
     
    ————
     
    SPIRIT RULES SECRETLY ALONE THE BODY ACHIEVES NOTHING
     
    is something you know
     
    instinctively at fourteen and can still remember even with hell in your head
     
    at sixteen. They painted this truth
     
    on the long wall of the high school the night before departing for Hades.
     
    Herakles’ hometown of Hades
     
    lay at the other end of the island about four hours by car, a town
     
    of moderate size and little importance
     
    except for one thing.
Have you ever seen a volcano?
said Herakles.
     
    Staring at him Geryon felt his soul
     
    move in his side. Then Geryon wrote a note full of lies for his mother
     
    and stuck it on the fridge.
     
    They climbed into Herakles’ car and set off westward. Cold green summer night.
     
    Active?
     
    The volcano? Yes the last time she blew was 1923. Threw 180 cubic kilometers
     
    of rock into the air
     
    covered the countryside with fire overturned sixteen ships in the bay.
     
    My grandmother says
     
    the temperature of the air rose to seven hundred degrees centigrade downtown.
     
    Caskets
     
    of whiskey and rum burst into flame on the main street.
     
    She saw it erupt?
     
    Watched from the roof. Took a photograph of it, three p.m. looks like midnight.
     
    What happened to the town?
     
    Cooked. There was a survivor—prisoner in the local jail.
     
    Wonder what happened to him.
     
    You’ll have to ask my grandmother about that. It’s her favorite story
—
     
    Lava Man.
     
    Lava Man?
Herakles grinned at Geryon as they shot onto the freeway.
     
    You’re going to love my family.
     
     

XII. LAVA
     
    Click here for original version
     
    He did not know how long he had been asleep.
     
     
    ————
     
    Black central stalled night. He lay hot and motionless, that is, motion
     
    was a memory he could not recover
     
    (among others) from the bottom of the vast blind kitchen where he was buried.
     
    He could feel the house of sleepers
     
    around him like loaves on shelves. There was a steady rushing sound
     
    perhaps an electric fan down the hall
     
    and a fragment of human voice tore itself out and came past, it seemed
     
    already long ago, trailing
     
    a bad dust of its dream which touched his skin. He thought of women.
     
    What is it like to be a woman
     
    listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence stretches between them
     
    like geothermal pressure.
     
    Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as lava. She